I wish I had come to more of James Baldwin’s Early Novels & Stories, collected in this volume from Library of America, much earlier in my life. Before picking this up, I hadn’t read any of his work since I was in my early twenties, probably, and I had largely forgotten my impressions.
Go Tell It on the Mountain hit me like a ton of bricks. Perhaps that would be foretold, as Go Tell It is the first one here and an introduction into what was his vivid and consistent style for at least the following fifteen years. Like Giovanni’s Room, the story is told more or less across one long night, with flashbacks filling in the bulk.
But I didn’t know that before opening the pages (perhaps one of the benefits of forgetting or not reading around in advance), so while I found the opening section of Go Tell It arresting, mostly due to Baldwin’s simultaneously relaxed and insistent prose, it was when I reached the second section, which leads us back in time to the earlier days of the protagonist John’s father Gabriel and his sister Florence, that I realized I was reading something not only superb but — and this may startle you as much as it startled this reader — a work that felt it was written only for me. I ceased paying attention to my surroundings. Readers will know this feeling is rare, even when consuming top flight authors. But it is one of the exceptional and unique powers of the arts, to reach across demography and generations, to produce something that will be experienced as personal to many individuals who later come across it.
To state the obvious, I would have had some qualities in common with James Baldwin, as any given reader might, but the differences would have been far more conspicuous and stark. And yet, the pages of Go Tell It gave that epiphanous feeling (religious in nature, Baldwin or Henry James may have declared) that he had just transported his book to my lap to relate an intimate and revealing story that he might have otherwise relayed across the privacy of my living room coffee table so that, I, too, could understand him and find that parts of myself were also lived by someone else, however different he might have seemed and been.
That first book was, for me, the best of this volume. When all the works are read together, it is easy to observe a recurring and interesting pattern in Baldwin’s novels: he routinely writes long scenes, and I do mean long, emphasis on their length, in that they regularly feel as if they go on for too many exchanges of dialogue and inaction, until, finally, they suddenly and almost quietly reveal a plot change or a character development, often in a tucked away sentence, planted in such a way as to startle you, yet belonging there as if from primeval craton.
In the lengthy novel Another Country, which I have learned some regard, alongside the short story Sonny’s Blues, as the Big One of Baldwin’s fiction life, one might get the impression that what he was aiming to do was decades later picked up and more perfectly executed by his friend Toni Morrison in Jazz. Music and style, accord and discord, the various players talking to one another. Probably some great good host of literary experts have spent time on the question whether Baldwin would have preferred, somehow, to have been a musician himself. But Another Country also must have been a firework when it appeared in the early 1960s, offering frank depictions of sex, many interracial and bisexual relationships, and some routine interest in drugs.
One tidbit from this volume is the inclusion of the short story “The Rockpile,” from the collection Going to Meet the Man, which is clearly an expanded version and draft of what turned out to be a pivotal scene in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Though it is not nearly as good as what remained in the novel, there is some kind of satisfaction in seeing, in black and white, what could have been and what was excluded, as well as a tiny piece of plot apocrypha.
This volume was edited by none other than the legendary Ms. Morrison herself. That was exciting to see when I picked it up, but I found myself wondering what it meant, as it was not easy to tell from the book’s appendages. One of the great pleasures of Library of America is the depth and excellence of the series’ End Notes, which are regrettably uneven from volume to volume. This instance was one of the most bleakly sparse I have encountered. Perhaps a later edition will expand them. Perhaps it was enough for Library of America to score the great coup of persuading Ms. Morrison to edit the volume. Or perhaps, if we are being somewhat more charitable, the sparseness of explanatory and contextual notes is exactly how Ms. Morrison intended it: leave the commentary out, leave the music to the composer, leave the reader to his private contemplation, and leave Baldwin’s lines alone so that they may reach you, finally, on their own.